376 ROMAN ARCHITECTURE. Part I. circumstances it was invented. We shall subsequently have to trace how far it advanced towards that perfection at which it aimed, but to which it never reached. Strangely enough, it failed solely because of the revival and the pernicious influence of that very parent style to which it owed its birth, and the growtli and maturity of which we have just been describing. It was the grandeur of the edifices reared at Rome in the first centuries of the Empire which so impressed the architects of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, that they "abandoned their own beautiful style to imitate that of the Romans, but with an incongruity which seems inevitably to result from all imitations, as contrasted with true creations, in architectural art. Egyptian Vase. From a painting.
